The Fourth Bench Four terraces below the working face
High, cheap, loud and young — and every building on it carries a brass plate saying the year it comes down.
A bench is not a place
The Scales counts its terraces down from the working face. First Bench is the live cut — dust, cranes, blasting, and nobody sleeps there. By Fourth you are clear of the worst of it, and Fourth and Fifth are where the city drinks: high, cheap, loud, young, and close enough to the workings that half the room came straight off shift.
But the face moves, and the city walks. Fourth Bench today is not the ground Fourth Bench stood on two hundred years ago — it is not even in the same part of the valley. The number describes a distance from the work, and nothing else. An address here is an interval.
The removal plate
Beside the door of every building is a brass plate giving the year it comes down. People touch it on the way in. Nobody remembers starting that, and nobody would call it a superstition.
Property is priced accordingly. You can take a fine set of rooms very cheaply if they are coming down in six years, and people do — which is why the bench is full of the young, the transient, and everybody who would rather spend the money on the evening.
You can hold the same address in the upper Scales your entire life and never once live in the same place twice.
What "removal" actually means
Not demolition. Nothing in this world is discarded, so a building in the path of the workings is dismantled, carried lower and re-erected out of its own materials. Many have stood eleven or twelve times in eleven or twelve places.
And because names accrete with every rebuild, the oldest buildings on any bench carry plates that have outgrown their walls. A minor guild office here has an inscription that would embarrass a cathedral anywhere else.
A note on the word
The formal term for a terrace is scamnum — which also means a stool. The word for a level of the city and the word for the thing you sit on at a bar are the same word, in both registers.
Nobody native finds this funny. Every visitor does.
What is on it
Bars, mostly, and the people who work four benches above them. The best rooms in the world are up here precisely because the district is condemned — nobody sends an inspector to a place coming down in four years, so this is where the beat licence gets ignored.
The house we have walked into is the Short Measure, whose plate says eleven years.